Front page | perl.bootstrap |
Postings from July 2000
From: Ken Fox <kfox@vulpes.com> >Joshua N Pritikin wrote: > > Perl5 => Intermediate Representation (C or C++ or Obj-C) => Perl6 > >Oooh... Then all the academics would *have* to take Perl seriously. >I mean that's *conclusive proof* that Perl6 is a research project... ;) > > > Chip's Topaz idea was to use C++ instead of C. > >Which was (and still is) a good decision for all the many reasons >Chip has talked about. > > > Maybe C++ is still too low-level. > >rotfl. 1000 pages of specs and it's still too low-level? (But >perhaps in this age of a decoded human genome I shouldn't confuse >low-level with smaller and simpler?) > >I think one of the problems with C++ is that it's too high-level for >implementing some critical features like dynamic module loading. There's >just too much freedom in implementing a C++ compiler (yes, bondage >and discipline only applies to the followers, not the high priests.) > > > I propose that perl6 be written exclusively in perl5. > >The scheme48 project had a very good experience writing the core >in a reduced dialect of scheme. This reduced dialect could be "easily" >translated to a machine representation (they used C). I would support >a similar implementation of perl6. (The reduced perl could be the >ultra-portable microperl.) I like this idea. However, as performance is still somewhat of an issue (and perl5, at least, eats immense amounts of memory even in C), I would propose that the intermediate language (and that of the microperl6) be C, rather than something higher level with more overhead. However, perl6 can't be *exclusively* in perl5. After all, there will be some code modules (scalar variable handling, for instance) that are not optional. Even if they're wrapped in a perl5 script, the script likely won't be much more than a bunch of here-docs, with maybe a few conditionals depending on the configuration chosen... ;) -- BKS ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com